Martyrdom of Guru Arjan

The Martyrdom of Guru Arjan commemorates the death in 1606 of Guru Arjan (1563-1606), the fifth Sikh Guru and the first of the tradition's martyrs. Arjan's achievements were foundational: he compiled the Adi Granth, the first authoritative collection of Sikh scripture, in 1604, gathering the hymns of his predecessors and other saints; he completed the building of the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, at Amritsar; and he gave the growing community an institutional strength that drew the suspicion of the Mughal state. He was arrested under the emperor Jahangir, tortured and died in custody, an event Sikhs understand as a witness (shahidi) given rather than a defeat.

His martyrdom is regarded as a turning point in Sikh history, marking the community's move toward the readiness to defend itself that his son and successor, Guru Hargobind, embodied in taking up the "two swords" of spiritual and temporal authority. The day is kept, in the height of the North Indian summer (Jyeshtha, May-June), with gatherings in the gurdwaras and a custom especially associated with it: the setting up of stalls offering chilled sweetened water and milk (chhabeel) to passers-by, a gesture of service recalling the suffering of the Guru in the heat. It is an observance of a more solemn cast than the birthday gurpurabs, honouring sacrifice for faith and principle.

Historians offer more than one explanation for why Jahangir moved against Guru Arjan specifically in 1606, and the accounts are not mutually exclusive: alongside the general Mughal unease at the growing institutional strength and following of the Sikh community this entry's first article describes, Jahangir's own memoirs record his anger at reports that Guru Arjan had blessed or otherwise supported Khusrau Mirza, the emperor's own son, who led an unsuccessful rebellion against his father that same year, a specific and immediate political charge layered on top of the broader, longer-building suspicion of the Guru's authority and resources.

Whether the Khusrau connection was the decisive trigger, a convenient additional justification for an arrest Jahangir was already inclined to make, or a genuinely central cause in its own right remains debated among historians working from the available Mughal and Sikh sources, which do not fully agree on the sequence and weight of events, but the political rebellion angle is a documented part of the historical record around the martyrdom that sits alongside, rather than replacing, the institutional and religious tensions between the growing Sikh community and the Mughal state that the broader Sikh historical tradition emphasises.